Facing a Crossroads with Your Business

When you’re running a business, you will always have to face big decisions. It’s part of your role as CEO or founder: you have the authority to make big decisions, but you also have to bear the responsibility for the outcome.

Day to day, you’re mostly taking smaller decisions, looking at feedback or acting as a face for the brand, talking to potential clients and high-level customers. Occasionally, though, you’ll find yourself facing a crossroads for your business, and big decisions like this can be difficult to face with confidence. Today we’re taking a look at these ‘crossroad moments’ and helping you come up with a plan for making decisions that you can feel confident in even when the pressure is on.

Defining Success

One of the most important things you can do when running a business is defining what success looks like for you. This can be a multistage process: knowing what long term goals you are pushing towards – the long view of success – gives shape to how you approach the short and medium-term future.

Deciding on your vision of success, and reviewing it as your circumstances change gives you a deeper understanding of your business and helps you navigate through difficult times: which outcome gives you the most chance of achieving the definition of success you’ve set for yourself.

Well–Founded Decisions

You also need to make sure you’re basing your decisions on good information. If you don’t know the state of the market you’re selling into, the depth of demand that exists for what you offer, and the factors that customers will be swayed by when they’re looking to make a purchase, then you’re lacking the foundations of good decision-making.

Your ability to gather this information is limited but working with a market research firm can get you the market intelligence that is necessary for you to make decisions you can trust in.

Learning From the Past

It’s important to have processes built from the ground up in your business that allow you to reflect on previous decisions and see where your decision making process has lead to good results and where the outcome has been less positive. If you’re able to look back and see where and how your previous decisions have lead to success and failure, you can streamline your decision-making process over time to lead to the best results more often!